I’m getting ready to release my second game, Demon’s Rise, which is a turn-based strategic RPG. I had a long list of little things to fix and decided to do it all last weekend. I worked like crazy … stayed up until around 3am on Saturday, for example. Did a new app preview video and all of the annoying little bits of polish that is time consuming and no fun.
Then this morning, I deleted some cache file on my macbook and when rebooting … it wouldn’t start. I spent 3 hours with Apple support and eventually had to format the drive and do a clean install of the OS.
Luckily I had a backup but it was from just before the weekend so all that work is gone and needs to be redone. Backup seems to be in good shape though and am right now just doing a build. Hopefully it all goes well.
I have to say it’s not been an entirely bad day. I woke up to a very nice preview article about my game on TouchArcade:
Oh and on the positive side, while I did lose my app preview … I did upload it both to iTunes connect and Youtube so it exists in the ether and should still be usable in my app submission.
Not my kind of game, but I think most of us can tell how hard you worked on this. I just wanted to stop by to congratulate you on the hard work. Don’t give up.
I couldn’t live without source control for code assets. A remote repository is great for safety. But it also protects you from yourself. If you have a feature that suddenly stops working you can easily see what was changed, and when.
Congratulations on getting that far! It looks really good, and I would want to play it if you are targeting Android eventually. I’m happy for you, and admittedly a little jealous at the same time ;).
Second thing, please use source control on your projects. Every developer should use it, and if not, you’re dooming yourself. I personally use perforce for code (habit from past job) and SVN for data (auto removes readonly flag when editing). Both are free to use, and just a little bit of time to learn. There are of course other options out there, but those are my suggestions.
Hey mate, sad to hear that, is good that you have a backup, but as you said, is not a true backup.
For all of you who posted here, please try to understand the difference between scheduled backup and continuous (versioned) backup.
For Unity and maybe all dev project incremental continuous (versioned) backup is the solution. There are plenty of solutions to chose from, and lot’s of cloud based.
I put my work regularly into a remote Git (vso) and can really recommend that. How often have I seen an asset upgrade go wild or accidentally reset/overrode some resources that messed up all my settings etc. Happens all the time. Then I do “git checkout .” and I am back to normal It’s also very handy to see that way what has changed in upgraded asset scripts by diffing to the previous version.
The problem with restoring from backups, especially if you’re going back days or worst case weeks (or even months), is that you can’t easily see see what files changed on those dates, and in Unity that means dependencies.
With versioning, you can browse the timeline of your project, see commits with sensible logs (always commit with informative logs) and revert to all the necessary files in one go, seeing side-by-side now-and-then code comparisons so you know what’s different before you go ahead.
Backups are good for critical failures (like a hard drive going down). They’re really not good for restoring old content or functionality unless it’s literally just old images (even then image dimensions may change for instance, which - depending on what they’re for, could screw up other things).
You also get to use Unity Cloud Build, which is v. useful if you’re developing for iOS, Android or Webplayer…fire & forget commit & builds.
Hehe I hate TortoiseSVN (which I’ve used since…forever) so so much after using Git for just 9 months. Try it out, it’s weird at first but the genius of it grabs you without your realising it.
I’ll give it a shot with my next project. The only reason I’ve been using TortoiseSVN is due to Dreamhost supporting SVN for their shared hosting accounts.
